January 14, 2006

What's next for Apple?

Clayton M. Christensen, author of book The Innovator’s Dilemma and Seeing What’s Next: Using Theories of Innovation to Predict Industry Change, think that Apple’s current success might not last long with the proprietary architecture of iPod.

iPod is the dominant MP3 player in the market right now. But I don’t think it’s the software inside that made the success. It’s the design being the key to get it standing out of others. The design of the looks-n-feel, how users interact with the device, and the supporting community forking out more innovative products surrounding it, and etc. All of these getting Apple in the lead of market. That’s its core competency: ability to innovate. Getting iTunes or the iPod softwares open and hook into every other MP3 players seem great. But who’d want that? People no longer need to stand on the edge-technology to produce yet another MP3 players. In 90s, Apple get beaten by didn’t recognizing the power of openning PC architecture. But MP3 player is really another play field, other vendors won’t need any open standard to produce a look-alike and act-alike player. The market might keep growing for another 2 or 3 years. But then you’d need other thing to sell, neither audio player or some video player gadget, it’s something else. Something that only company with the ability to innovate would produce and get in the lead.

How about Mac OS running on Intel platform and made more users switch? I don’t think Apple would get much more share of PC users market. Most of the people has been used to their Windows PC and comfortably stay still with it. There’s large potential in younger ages or hacker community, not the mass market. Would OS X get any chance? Probably. I’m buying the great platform given by Mac OS X and lots of great softwares on it. If Apple do want to open, it should open the Cocoa framework to the world out there. It’s the well designed interfaces and platform drives more innovation in softwares — and softwares bring in more demand for the OS.

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January 11, 2006

MacBook Pro

So Steve delivered the keynote for Macworld 06, pretty much the same model as last year. Starting with the retails update for 2005 and introducing new, cool stuff. Here’s the summary:

Anyhow, MacBook Pro’s spec looks impressing: the same Intel Core Duo (1.67 or 1.83Ghz), first using PCI Express card, up to 120GB SATA hard drive. The initial deliver seem only providing 15-inch model, expect to be out in Feb. It’s looking good, powerful, as it claimed in its webpage - Wishes do come true. Argh…I wish I’d have one soon, although not practical for me.

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January 10, 2006

"Real" Windows Vista

Since it’s a Mac day, let’s have some amusing video to watch:

If you follow Longhorn/Vista development, this should earn a good laugh. It’s a hilarious clip from Tauquil Atkinson.

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Macworld San Francisco 2006

Macworld 2006 kicks off today and Steve Jobs would deliver the opening keynote address. Steve is always the best person to kick off any large Mac event. He’s the icon of Apple and every media loves him (US media). You could see that from the media coverage once he delivers his speech, all eyes on him. Then for sure that the Mac blogland would be full of stuff he’s going to talk about, for days, even weeks. The top searching words today for Technorati would be “Apple”, “Mac” or “Macworld”..

And this year no doubt that many would expect on some news of the Intel Mac. I am more expecting for some news of Mac OS X, may be some breakthrough of the next version development?

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November 29, 2005

Apple Mac OS Broadband Tuner

Apple released Broadband Tuner 1.0. It adjusts the TCP send/receive and socket buffer, intending to let Mac OS users take the full advantage of their high speed broadband (with high latency).

Of course you could adjust the system variable with sysctl (under root authority) if you know how to do it. The Tuner basically changes the following parameters:

Why Apple released the broadband booster now, that they could have done it long time ago? Pushing for more iTunes downloading?

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November 28, 2005

Mozilla Firefox 1.5 in Mac OS X

I changed my browser back and forth in between Safari and Firefox. Lately Firefox 1.5 has been much more often than Safari. Its new tab option: “Force links that open new windows open in: A New Tab” just wins my heart — it match exactly what I used to do. I knew that Command+click could let you open a new tab of the links. But well, less key-strokes is always better for me.

On the other hand, probably I didn’t search hard enough for the right key (I don’t bother to do key remapping yet on my iBook). Use Command + Shift + {{ or }} is simply damn painful and inconvenient. Mozilla Firefox works sweet with Alt + 1, 2, 3… for the respective tabs opened. I use Adium as the basic IM client on Mac OS X, so it has the same shortcut key for multiple chat windows. So Firefox score +1.

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November 04, 2005

Mike's book: Jobs I’ve Known

Mike Evangelist is using his blog Writers Block Live as a tool to write his new book Jobs I’ve Known. There are a lot of interesting stories, good to get a bit more inside-info into how Apple running the business and how Steve Jobs actually making the key impact in each Apple product development.

Here are some nice pieces:
* Steve Jobs, the Genuine Article
* Apple - Thinking Different Again
* Making It Look Easy - The Birth of the iPod

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July 14, 2005

Where's the maximize button?

On Windows every window got the minimize, maximize, close button at its right top. Mac OS X got the same thing, except it is at the left top, and at the reverse order. Nope, it’s not that hard to use to that, since I couldn’t quite stand with the one button Touchpad, I’ve gone to buy a cute mini RF opticial mouse to use. And it isn’t that far to change your habit to move from the right top to the left top, after all it’s just a 12 inches TFT screen.

Yeah..12 inches TFT LCD screen. I’d bet you could imagine how competitive the screen space is. Good, so I should focus on one application window and stay along with my work. The dock should be auto-hide so then I could enjoy 15cm more height :)…but then! It just ain’t let go and let me maximize the window! Mac OS X window has the X - + little button, from left to right sticking at the left top corner. But the “+”, which I thought it would be the same maximize button as Windows is, it would just try to get the window bigger enough for users’ viewing pleasure. Well, that’s very considering… Imagine this, in a web browser I am using, on one URL you’ve surfed to, you click the “+” to make the window showing bigger to suit the content. Then after while, surfing to the other web page, the space ain’t enough, the horizontal scrollbar appear at the bottom, so you click the “+” again. And then you switch URL, and then you click “+” again, and again.…so and so, isn’t it annoying?!

Would it please have a pure maximize button?

Disclaimer: I haven’t google anything about it yet.

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July 13, 2005

Like and Dislike of the iBook

Like

Dislike

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July 11, 2005

First Impression

It is plain beautiful — that’s my first impression to my iBook. The colours looks fine and fonts is just right…Yeah, RIGHT! I used to have high request for the font in the computer I used, I like the good looking and smooth fonts. It’s just not feeling right when I see ugly font in my computer, kind of paranoid of it.

Do I ever use Mac? Well, back to 10 years ago I remembered that’s one night I have to go to computer lab to do some homework. There wasn’t any PC available then I felt lucky to find a Mac. Without other choice then so I sit down and open photoshop to have a try — double-click->crash, open->crash.….then I gave up and left. So that’s the first experience. After that I have never touch a Mac machine except standing inside some Apple store, holding a mouse, looking at the beautiful screen and clicking here-n-there for one or two minutes. That’s all.

Ever since I thought it’s cool to have an Apple laptop, I finally bought one 2 years later.

It’s a second hand iBook G4. It run Mac OS X Panther. I don’t get the original OS CD, I don’t get the bag, oops…I don’t even know the administrator password!! The first thing I want to do is try to bring the softwares up-to-date. But I don’t have the Admin’s password in order to install software.

Did some google give me these links:

It’s either one of these ways:

  1. If you are already logon as an admin, great, all you need to do is just type : sudo passwd root, then give the new password
  2. If you got the original Mac OS X CD, just boot it up with the CD, and choose reset password
  3. Follow the above link, it teach you to hold Command + S button on the OS rebooting, go into the plain old console mode, mounting file system and then: passwd root, give the new password, reboot. Done.

Well well well…good advice, when I saw all those links, I’ve been playing little smart to create a userid of my own and make it auto-login, then I ever rebooted it. Stupid me. So I don’t have a original OS CD, and…I have already login with the new account (no more the old and good admin — even though it isn’t my name). Okay I have the last choice, follow the instructions to boot up into console mode step by step, then “passwd root”. Nope, it didn’t work, it just quit and staring at me :(.

I have almost gave up after 30 minutes of trying, and then my UNIX mind ring a bell again :). I boot into the console mode, instead of changing the root’s password, I could change the sudoer!! So adding the new users into /etc/sudoer then reboot! Once rebooted my userid is some one who could su hahaha…that’s it, with “sudo passwd root” then I am done. Piece with the Mac OS X.

July 10, 2005

Switch

Ever since Mac OS X launched, I’ve been thinking of owning a machine running it. I used to think that a combination of a decent GUI environment with UNIX back-end/kernel would be the perfect OS. And now, finally, Apple hardware seem more affordable nowadays — then I convinced myself to buy this little thing:

P1010010.JPG

It’s a 12” 1.2Ghz Apple iBook G4, unfortunately what I bought is a 2nd hand iBook, it didn’t come with Mac OS X Tiger (10.4). From the web I could find it’s bought on April 21st and entitled to a Tiger up-to-date program, but too bad I couldn’t get seller’s original receipt on time, it was expired yesterday :(.

I didn’t really intend to switch. Having heard lots of good things about the Mac OS X, the state-of-art technology and good user interface, I want to learn about it. But I forsee for the difficulty to be used to it, after all I’ve been using PCs for more than 10 years. There’re lots of die-hard habits. What’s usability? It’s the less surprise for the users when he/she perform some action on the interface, we users should feel and get the response from the OS or application as what we expected.

That sounds true, so switching platform is not a easy and pleasant topic, I’d come to that later.

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